It seems to me that our society likes the negative. That shouldn’t be a revelation to anyone, whether you get your information from the Internet or from the nightly news. What I don’t understand is why we don’t focus more on the positive. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not an optimist. Far from it. I’m not talking about the power of positive thinking or anything like it.
I just think it’s strange that we are so enamored of the bad things that happen. Which celebrity marriage is headed for divorce, what sort of carnage is happening in the world, was anyone hurt in that horrible wreck? I suppose those things are titillating and that’s why we are attracted to them, but focusing so much on the negative has to have an impact on our lives.
To take one example – why do we focus so much on the high rate of divorce? Instead of trying to figure out why people are breaking up, why don’t we try to figure out what keeps them together? There are all sorts of reasons why the divorce rate is so high. Yet there are still marriages that can be measured in decades rather than minutes. Why is it we don’t spend more time learning what we should do, rather than what we shouldn’t?